The Future of Education
Using Sustainability Indicators in University Teacher Training Course
Eva Stratilová Urválková, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Svatava Janoušková, Charles University - Faculty of Science (Czech Republic)
Abstract
Sustainability is included in numerous European primary and secondary school curricula, and science is one of their mandatory subjects [1]. Sustainability education scholars seek to uncover ways to effectively transfer knowledge to the students while simultaneously looking for appropriate contexts to present science topics [2,3]. Moreover, experts pursue methods for helping students develop skills such as critical thinking, scientific thinking and reasoning or analytical thinking. Despite the consensus on the advantages of combining sustainability and science teaching, connecting all existing scientific knowledge and conveying it to the teachers is quite challenging [4]. We believe that helping students gain knowledge and develop skills by combining the content and methods of science and sustainability education should start with teacher training at the university. In our paper, we present the results of our three-year action research on a teacher training university course. Based on this research, we argue that using sustainability indicators is one of the most effective ways to connect often isolated knowledge about sustainability themes and science knowledge. Using sustainability indicators also enables us to show university students how to appropriately develop more general skills such as analytical or critical thinking in a natural way.
Keywords science education, sustainable development indicators, pre-service teachers, action research, curriculum development
References
[1] Stratilová Urválková, E.; Blaško, M.; Janoušková, S. Sustainability as a core concept of an integrated curriculum: Can the Czech curriculum follow the western countries? In Proceedings of the ICERI2021, Florence, Italy, 8–9 November 2021; pp. 7092–7100.
[2] Seatter, C.S.; Ceulemans, K. Teaching Sustainability in Higher Education: Pedagogical Styles That Make a Difference. Can. J. High. Educ. 2017, 47, 47–70.
[3] Dima, A.M.; Meghisan-Toma, G.M. Research on implementing education for sustainable development. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Business Excellence 2018, Bucharest, Romania, 22–23 March 2018; Volume 12, pp. 300–310. Available online: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/picbe-2018-0027
[4] Kioupi, V.; Voulvoulis, N. Education for sustainable development: A systemic framework for connecting the SDGs to educational outcomes. Sustainability 2019, 11, 6104.
